The playing ground is so uneven, and there have been so many straight characters for such a long time, and so many gay actors that have had to hide their sexuality to get the parts they want to play.
Some scenes are just more people's thing than others, and I know that my Gay New York is truly whatever I make of it. If I want her loud and lively, she's there. If I want sunsets and starlight, Battery Park, here I come.
I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly.
I'm not like a gay icon or America's gay sweetheart. I'm just America's sweetheart, and I'm just an icon.
I like to joke about being gay because it's something teenagers would never joke about.
Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.
For thousands of years, there have been lies about being gay or not being gay. If you know they're lies, you're free.
If hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it's worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
There are so many different camps about what being gay means. The danger comes when each one is so rigid that it sees itself as the true picture.
As a mom to biological children and adopted gay children all around the world, nothing gives my heart strings a tug as much as seeing a parent stand by their queer/gay/trans child with beaming pride.
While shooting in Uganda in 2011, the conservative evangelical pastors I was filming - the most ardent supporters of the country's now infamous Anti-Homosexuality Bill - discovered that I myself am gay.
In the U.K. there is still work to be done, particularly in schools, stopping the homophobic bullies in the playground and introducing unbiased discussion on gay issues in the classroom.
The FDA first began prohibiting gay and bisexual men from donating blood in the early 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when the risk from blood transfusion was just beginning to be understood. In the decades to follow, the 'lifetime ban' was left largely unchanged.
I'm a gay, undocumented immigrant; I have to be optimistic.
Our society needs to recognize the unstoppable momentum toward unequivocal civil equality for every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered citizen of this country.
It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.
Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black.
In retrospect, the most unnerving aspect of being openly gay was that it turned out to be as disappointingly normal as being straight.
Vice President Biden's surprising declaration of unqualified support for gay marriage seems to have forced President Obama into a public endorsement of a controversial social issue. It is difficult not to suspect that Biden's pronouncement aimed to give the president some political cover.
I graduated from high school in '62 and I didn't know any people who were gay. I'm sure there were people, but I didn't know any. For years and years, I guess, I was very uptight about being a gay actor. I thought it would make me less hirable.
